There are many occasions when the communication demand between two or more stations of a wireless communication system may vary. Particularly, this is true with respect to stations located in air vehicles, such as aircrafts and UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). Namely, these types of vehicles are capable of traveling long distances in a relatively short time. Moreover, the possibility and/or requirement to exchange information between two or more stations may be highly dependent upon the distances between the vehicles. Therefore, a protocol for communicating data between airborne stations must be very dynamic and flexible.
An STDMA (Self-organized Time Division Multiple Access) system is capable of handling the communication dynamics and the inherent unpredictability of the airborne stations' behavior. In an STDMA system a self-organizing transmission algorithm is applied to allow simultaneous transmissions from many stations, while minimizing the risk of transmission conflicts. Furthermore, the stations themselves control the usage of the transmission resources, i.e. without any external controlling or polling functions from a base station structure or a corresponding master control entity. However, an external time reference in the form of a ground station or satellite is normally required. As a consequence of the distributed resource control only a partial, or local, organization of the communication resources is possible. Therefore, the self-organizing transmission algorithm must be capable of handling occasional communication conflicts, which are unavoidable when two or more stations which have been located outside one another's communication ranges approach each other, such that their communication ranges suddenly overlap.
Moreover, also when a number of stations are present within one another's communication ranges and the self-organizing transmission algorithm has already enabled a non-conflicting exchange data between the stations situations may arise which render it necessary to establish particular services involving these stations, where the services depend upon particular characteristics of the vehicles and/or the vehicles' spatio-temporal interrelationship. However, there is yet no automatic technical solution as how to handle such situations.